ABSTRACT: This paper defends the doctrine of Unrestricted Exportation (UE) against Saul Kripke’s attack on it. According to UE, the exportation step from the de dicto belief report, S believes that α is F, together with the premise that α exists, to the de re report, S believes of α that it is F, is valid. By presenting an alleged counterexample, Kripke tries to show that UE has much more implausible consequences than its advocates would accept. By going through the (...) details of Kripke’s scenario, I argue that UE does not commit us to the consequences Kripke associates with it. (shrink)

The well known fact that beliefs may be ascribed either de dicto or de re raises a problem about the role of belief ascriptions in the explanation of action because it suggests that both kinds of ascriptions may help explain why an agent acted. Some explanations may require only de dicto belief ascriptions, others only de re ascriptions, while still others require ascriptions of both types. As a first step toward sorting out these alternatives I want to consider whether de (...) re ascriptions which impute to the agent beliefs about himself or about some other person ever help to explain actions. I shall discuss this question from the perspective of two radically different theories of de re belief, assuming throughout that de dicto belief ascriptions are explanatory. (shrink)

Richard Feldman in ‘Actions and De Re Beliefs’ attacks ‘latitudinarian’ accounts of de re belief in terms of de dicta belief, including those defended in print by one or the other of us. Feldman's case against latitudinarian views rests on the claim that such accounts do not allow de re attitudes an explanatory role they obviously can fulfil.

Abstract Stephen P. Stich rejects the de dicto?de re belief state and ascription distinction. He proposes an analysis by which belief sentences imply univocal doxastic predicates expressing functionally similar states of belief subjects and counterfactual third person belief ascribers, concluding that the apparent opacity of de dicto belief sentences is better explained by the unsystematic contextually?sensitive similarity vaguenesses of belief ascriptions. But Stick's reduction appeals to contexts of background beliefs which themselves unavoidably exhibit ramified de dicto?de re ambiguity. The distinction (...) is presupposed rather than eliminated by Stick's method, which effectively blocks the extensional reduction of belief state opacity. (shrink)